Death in a Strange Country (34 page)

‘Probably because we
found the girl. We warned her family, when we took her back to them, not to say
anything. But someone called the papers, and it was all over the front pages.
You know, “Joyous Liberation”, complete, with pictures of her with her mother,
eating her first dish of pasta in two months. They must have read about it and
figured we were looking for them, getting dose. So they killed him.’

‘Why not just let him go?’
Then, because it had not been said, Brunetti asked, ‘How old was he?’

‘Twelve.’ There followed
a long pause, then Ambrogiani answered the first question. ‘Letting him go
would be bad business. It would let other people know that if we got close
enough, there might be a chance for them. By killing him, they made the message
clear: we mean business, and if you don’t pay, we kill.’

Ambrogiani opened the
bottle of wine and poured some into the plastic cups. They each ate a sandwich,
then, because there was nothing else to do, another. During all of this,
Brunetti had kept himself from looking at his watch, knowing that it would be
later, the longer he waited. Unable to resist, he looked. Noon. The hours
stretched ahead. He rolled down the window, looked over at the mountains for a
long time. When he glanced back, Ambrogiani was asleep, head canted to the
left, resting against the window. Brunetti watched the traffic going down and
coming up the steep gradient. All of the cars looked pretty much the same to
him, different only in colour and, if they were moving slowly enough, in number
plate.

After an hour, the
traffic began to taper off, everyone had stopped to eat. Soon after he noticed
this, he heard the sharp exhalation of air from the brakes of a truck and
looked up to see a large truck with a red stripe along the side pass down the
hill.

He poked Ambrogiani in
the arm. The Carabiniere was instantly awake, his hand turning the key. He
pulled onto the road and followed the truck. About two kilometres from where
they had been parked, the truck signalled and then turned off to the right,
disappearing down a narrow dirt-covered road. They drove past, continuing down
the hill, but Brunetti saw Ambrogiani reach out to the dashboard and push the
button that moved the mileometer back to zero. After he had gone a full
kilometre, he pulled off the road and cut the engine.

‘What was the number
plate?’

‘Vicenza,’ Brunetti said
and pulled out his notebook to write the numbers down while they were still
fresh in his memory. ‘What do you think?’

‘We stay here until the
truck passes us on the way down or we wait half an hour and go back.’

After half an hour, the
truck had not passed the place where they were parked, so Ambrogiani drove back
up towards the road the truck had turned into. They passed it and he pulled off
to the right a bit beyond it, angling the car in between two cement road
markers.

Ambrogiani got out and
went around to the boot of the car. He opened it and reached in. Slipped in
next to the tyre was a large calibre pistol, which he pushed into the waistband
of his trousers. ‘You have one?’ he asked.

Brunetti shook his head. ‘I
didn’t bring it today.’

‘I’ve got another one in
here. Want it?’

Brunetti shook his head
again.

Ambrogiani slammed the
boot closed and together they walked across the road and onto the dirt path
that led off towards the mountains.

Trucks had worn a double
groove into the dirt of the path; with the first heavy rain, the dirt would
turn to mud, and the road would be impassable to vehicles the size of the truck
they had seen turn into it. After a few hundred metres, the path widened
minimally and curved to run alongside a stream that had to be coming down from
the lake. Soon the path branched off to the left, leaving the stream and now
following a long line of trees. Ahead, the path took another sharp turn to the
left and up a sharp incline, where it seemed to come to an end. With no
warning, Ambrogiani stepped behind one of the trees and pulled Brunetti after
him. With a single motion, the Carabiniere reached inside his jacket and pulled
out his gun with one hand and, with the other, gave Brunetti a brutal push in
the centre of his back that sent him spinning away, completely off-balance.

Brunetti flailed at the
air with his arms, unable to stop his forward motion. For an instant, he hung
between motion and collapse, but then the ground sloped away under him and he
knew he was going to fall. As he did, he turned his head and saw Ambrogiani
coming directly after him, gun in hand. His heart contracted in sudden terror.
He had trusted this man, never stopping to think that the person at the
American base who had learned about Foster’s curiosity and who had learned
about Doctor Peters’ affair with him could just as easily be an Italian as an
American. And he had even offered Brunetti a gun.

He crashed forward onto
the ground, stunned, wind knocked from him. He tried to push himself to his
knees, he thought of Paola, and he was conscious of the blaze of sunlight all
around him. Ambrogiani crashed to the ground beside him, threw an arm over his
back, and pushed him back down to the ground. ‘Stay down. Keep your head down,’
he said into Brunetti’s ear, lying beside him, arm across his back.

Brunetti lay on the
earth, digging his hands into the grass beneath him, eyes closed, conscious
only of the weight of Ambrogiani’s arm and of the sweat that covered his entire
body. Through the torrent of his pulse, he heard the sound of a truck coming
towards them from what had seemed the end of the road. As he listened, its
motor drummed past them then grew dimmer as it made its way back towards the
main road. When it was gone, Ambrogiani pushed himself heavily to his knees and
started to brush off his doming. ‘Sorry,’ he said, smiling down at Brunetti and
extending his hand. ‘I just did it, didn’t have time to think. You all right?’

Brunetti took his hand,
pulled himself up, and stood beside the other man, knees trembling
uncontrollably. ‘Sure, fine,’ he said, and bent to swipe the worst of the dust
off his trousers. His underclothing stuck to his body, glued there by the sudden
wave of animal terror that had overcome him.
         
                     
                     
                     

Ambrogiani turned and went
back towards the path, either in complete ignorance of Brunetti’s
fear
or in an exquisite gesture of feigned ignorance. Brunetti finished dusting
himself off, took a few deep breaths, and followed Ambrogiani down the
path
to where it started to rise. It did not end but, instead, twisted suddenly to
the right and stopped abruptly at the edge of a small bluff. Together, the
two
men walked up to the edge and looked down over it. Below them spread an area
about half the size of a soccer field, most of it covered with creeping vines
that could easily have grown up that same summer. The end nearest them,
spreading out from the rise of land they stood on, contained about a hundred
metal barrels that must
once have contained kerosene. Mixed in with them
were large black plastic bags, industrial strength, sealed closed at one end.
At some point, a bulldozer must have been used, for the barrels at the far end
disappeared under a heap of vine-covered earth that had been piled over them.
There was no telling how far back the covered barrels extended, no hope of
counting them.
 
                     
                   

‘Well; it seems like we’ve
found what the American was looking for,’ Ambrogiani said.
     
   

‘I’d guess he found it,
too.’
 
                     
               

Ambrogiani nodded. ‘No
need to kill him if he didn’t. What do you think he did, confront
Gamberetto
directly?’

‘I don’t know,’ Brunetti
said. It didn’t make sense, so severe a response. What was the worst that could
have happened to Gamberetto? A fine? Surely, he’d blame the drivers, even pay
one of them to say he did it on his own. He would hardly lose a contract to
build a hospital if something like this was discovered; Italian law treated it
as little more than a misdemeanour. He would be in more serious danger if he
were caught driving an unregistered car. That, after all, deprived the
government directly of income; this merely poisoned the earth.

‘Do you think we can get
down there?’ he asked.

Ambrogiani stared at him.
‘You want to go and look at that stuff?’

‘I’d like to see what’s
written on the barrels.’

‘Maybe if we cut down to
the left, over there,’ Ambrogiani said, pointing off in that direction to a
narrow path that led down towards the dumping ground. Together, they walked down
the sharp incline, occasionally sliding in the dust, grabbing at one another to
stop their skidding descent. Finally, at the bottom, they found themselves only
a few metres from the first of the barrels.

Brunetti looked down at
the earth. The dust was dry and loose here, on the outskirts of the dump;
inside, it seemed to thicken and turn to paste. He walked towards the barrels,
careful where he placed his feet. Nothing was written on the top or sides; no
labels, no stickers, no identification of any sort. Moving along the outskirts
of the dump, careful not to step too close to them, he studied the tops and
visible sides of the barrels that stood there. They came almost to his hip,
each with a metal cap hammered tightly into place on the top. Whoever had placed
them there had at least been careful enough to place them upright.

When he reached the end
of the rows of exposed barrels without seeing any identification, he looked
back along the row he had walked beside, searching for a place where enough
room stood between them to allow him to move about among them. He went back a
few metres and found a place that would allow him to slip between them. The
stuff under his feet was more than paste now; it had turned to a thin layer of
oily mud that came up the sides of the soles of his shoes. He moved deeper into
the standing barrels, bending down now and again to search for any sign of
identification. His foot came up against one of the black plastic bags. The
barrel it rested against had a flap of paper hanging from it. Taking his
handkerchief, Brunetti reached out and turned the paper over. ‘US Air Force.
Ramst...’ Part of the last word was missing, but, ever since the Italian Air
Force flying squad had hurled their planes madly into one another, raining
death on the hundreds of German and American civilians below them, everyone in
Italy knew that the largest American military air base in Germany was at
Ramstein.

He kicked at the bag. It
shifted over on its side, and, from the shapes that protruded inside the plastic,
it seemed to be filled with cans. He took his keys from his pocket and slashed
at the bag, ripping it open all down one side. Cans and cardboard boxes spilled
out. As a can rolled towards him, he stepped back involuntarily.

From behind him, Ambrogiani
called out, ‘What is it?’

Brunetti waved his arm
above his head to signal that he was all right and bent to examine the writing
on the cans and boxes. ‘Government issue. Not for resale or private use’, was
written on some of them, in English. A few of the boxes had labels in German.
Most of them had the skull and crossbones that warned of poison or other
danger. He lifted his foot and prodded at a can with his foot. The label, also
in English, read, ‘If found, contact your NBC officer. Do not touch.’

Brunetti turned and
walked delicately towards the edge of the dumping ground, even more cautious
now where he placed his feet. A few metres from the edge, he dropped his
handkerchief to the earth and left it there. When he emerged from the barrels,
Ambrogiani came up to him.

‘Well?’ the Carabiniere
asked.

‘The labels are in
English and German. Some of them come from one of their air force bases in
Germany. I have no idea where the rest of it comes from.’ They started to walk
away from the dump. ‘What’s an NBC officer?’ Brunetti asked, hoping that
Ambrogiani would know.

‘Nuclear, biological, and
chemical.’

‘Mother of God,’ Brunetti
whispered.

There was no need for
Foster to have gone to Gamberetto to put himself in jeopardy. He was a young
man who kept books like
Christian Life in an Age of Doubt
on his shelf.
He probably would have done what any innocent young soldier would have done -
reported it to his superior officer. American waste. American military waste.
Shipped to Italy so that it could be dumped there. Secretly.